Currently when using configure --enable-header-install and doing make install the include files get installed to their own subdirectories, like:

/usr/local/include/dovecot/src/lib/ /usr/local/include/dovecot/src/lib-mail/ ..etc..

But using that is kind of annoying, because you have to give -I paths to all of them with their full directories. The worst thing about that is that it requires having some kind of a --with-dovecot=path configure parameter. It would be nice if you could simply do:

CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include/dovecot ./configure

Just like for any other include option. But that's not really possible.

One possible way to fix it would be to just install all the .h files to a single directory, /usr/local/include/dovecot/ and make sure there aren't any conflicts (there currently are a few). But whis would make it more difficult to find out what files are related.

Another possibility would be to put the subdir paths to all #include lines. Such as #include "lib-mail/mail-types.h" instead of just #include "mail-types.h". This seems kind of annoying to use, but would it be clearer? I'm not really sure.

Anyone have any thoughts?